While our three-branch system of government may seem dysfunctional at times, it serves to keep both the executive and legislative branches from assuming excessive powers.
Blaming the congressional impasse over the debt crisis on James Madison is the same as blaming George Bush for all of the Obama administration’s problems.
DON’T BLAME MADISON
By Dennis Hale
politicalmavens.com
August 4, 2011
Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield observed recently on the Huffington Post that if you are looking for someone to blame for the debt crisis, pick on James Madison. Why? Because Madison and his Federalist allies were so afraid of “factions” that they separated the government into three branches, and then divided the legislative branch into two houses. This would make it difficult for the government to do things, Greenfield concludes, and therefore less likely to do the wrong things.
The claim that America’s ‘divided government’ is less efficient than the parliamentary governments found elsewhere in the democratic world has been an important feature of liberal commentary since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was especially contemptuous of the power of congressional committees – and their imperious chairmen – to set the tone and direction of American government, while the president, a mere clerk by comparison, sat helplessly on the sidelines. The hopelessly antiquarian nature of American constitutionalism became a favorite theme of progressives, amplified by the rhetoric of Herbert Croly the theorist and Franklin Delano Roosevelt the practitioner.
A century later we are hearing the same theme again – maybe, just maybe, for the last time. For the plain and simple truth of the matter is that because of the American practice of separation of powers, it is possible for the legislature to chart a different course from that laid out by even a popular president. And because we have midterm elections, it is possible for a president’s course to be stopped dead in its tracks. In Europe, our parliamentary cousins, whose nations are drowning in debt, watch the United States Congress force upon a reluctant president a set of budget cuts, with no increases in either corporate or personal income tax rates, that dwarf what even British Prime Minister David Cameron has been able to accomplish at the head of a Conservative/Liberal coalition government (smaller cuts with increased taxes). As British journalist Toby Young put it recently, for “British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty.”
What about the claim that divided government makes it hard for the US government to “get anything done.” It is true that nationalizing health care was much more difficult in the US than in Britain. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labor government promised a national health service in the 1944 election, and enacted the program into law in what was, by comparison to the American experience, a matter of moments. By contrast, what President Truman dreamed of in 1948 was not accomplished (a form of it, at any rate) until 2009. On the other hand, many in Britain no doubt wish that Parliament had had a chance to give the matter a little more thought, given a crumbling infrastructure, crushing debt, and rationing of service.
But the US government did not achieve a $14 trillion debt by “doing nothing.” In fact, we have done too many things, too quickly and too thoughtlessly, in part because Democrats have dominated the conversation for such a long time, and in part because we have listened too readily to progressive blandishments about “streamlining” the political process. That circumstance has now changed dramatically: the conversation is no longer about “hope and change” – i.e., more public spending for more and more favored constituencies, paid for with borrowed and devalued money – but about fiscal sanity and a serious restructuring of programs that have been doomed from the outset. This is true not only in the US, but across Europe, where (to quote Toby Young again) majorities “in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.” Yet it is here, in the old-fashioned Madisonian republic, that the tide has finally turned, a direct consequence of the mid-term elections in 2010.
So raise your glass one more time to Jimmy Madison – the smartest man in the room.
No comments:
Post a Comment